


love, run me down

by hotaruyy



Category: Inception (2010), Tenet (2020)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Crossover, Fix-It, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-13
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:52:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26450683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hotaruyy/pseuds/hotaruyy
Summary: It’s alright, in the end. He unlocks the door, steps in front of the bullet. White-hot pain erupts in his head, and it’s alright. For a moment there’s a high-pitched whine in his ears, and then he falls into blessed darkness..Neil jolts awake.
Relationships: Arthur/Eames (Inception), Neil/The Protagonist (Tenet)
Comments: 25
Kudos: 167





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to this absolute mess of a crossover! Honestly I just wanted Neil to be Not Dead.
> 
> I’ve only seen Tenet once (at least, when I started writing this), and it’s been a while since I’ve seen Inception, so if there are any worldbuilding-related inaccuracies please sweep them under the rug of “artistic license”!
> 
> FYI Neil is not Max in this fic.

Neil already knows what’s about to happen. What has already happened. He smiles at the man in front of him before he turns away for the last time ( _his_ last time), and walks towards the turnstile. 

He couldn’t have chosen a better way to die. This feels inevitable, fulfilling, _peaceful_ , even, despite his undoubtedly bloody end. A bit like the way an inverted bullet slides back into the chamber of his gun, the sweet kick when it slams home. His heart beats steady, his breath easy in his own certainty that he will do and has done absolutely anything and everything for this man, even though after so many years he still doesn’t know his name.

It’s alright, in the end. He unlocks the door, steps in front of the bullet. White-hot pain erupts in his head, and it’s alright. For a moment there’s a high-pitched whine in his ears, and then he falls into blessed darkness.

* * *

Neil jolts awake.

He freezes for a second, and then scrabbles at his face to claw his mask off, except it isn’t there, and the pain behind his eyes feels _wrong_ , like a lingering phantom pain instead of like _a bullet having ripped through his brain_.

Something tugs at his arm and he finally looks down to see an IV sticking out of his forearm. He traces the line back to a contraption in a silver briefcase that gives him a weird sense of déjà vu, and then his eyes are immediately drawn to the Protagonist, hooked up to the same device, unconscious on the floor.

His heartbeat picks up, and he’s already scanning the room for immediate danger while pulling the IV out of his arm. When he confirms that there’s only two more people lying unconscious around them in what seems to be a study or library, he trips over to the Protagonist and puts his hands over his neck and above his nose.

An agonising moment later, Neil feels both his pulse and breathing. He lets out the breath he’s been holding and slumps down to sit next to the man. God. It would have been tragically funny if the man died anyway after Neil gave his life to save him.

And Neil knows he’s ignored the key issue long enough. At last, he cautiously brings his fingers to his forehead. Smooth skin meets his touch, and his hand jerks away from his face as if burned.

Neil stares at his utterly clean fingers. No sight of blood anywhere.

Impossible.

He should have died within seconds of being shot like that; there wouldn’t even have been time for someone to mess around with the turnstile to save him. Not that that would have worked either, now that he’s thinking about it. He was shot while already inverted.

Maybe he’s dreaming. Deathbed visions are a thing, aren’t they? So the Protagonist in front of him is an apparition that his brain hallucinated, to put himself at ease with dying. Except, well. Neil tries to shake the Protagonist awake, but he remains unresponsive. Right. Neil doesn’t understand how seeing the man being unconscious is supposed to comfort him, if this really is a deathbed vision. And the other two in the room — Neil gets up to look at them properly, and realises that it’s Kat half-sitting on the couch and Ives stretched out on the floor — aren’t even people he’s overly concerned with. It’s only ever been the Protagonist, for him.

Both Kat and Ives are hooked up to the briefcase in the middle of the room. There’s even another IV line resting on the seat next to Kat.

The room they’re in looks luxurious, if disturbed. The couch that Kat is on is the only piece of furniture in the room, and there’s a smear of what seems like a bloodstain on its arm. Under the warm, golden cove lighting, the mahogany bookshelves standing against the walls look mostly unscathed, apart from a gap in one row of books, and the few books scattered across the carpet. Probably thrown. A tall lamp with a brass body is lying overturned, shards of its broken lightbulb next to it. There’s also a handgun on the carpet. Neil picks it up and removes the magazine. It’s fully loaded. He snaps the magazine back in place.

Just as Neil is wondering whether it’s possible to wake the Protagonist and the other two, the door bursts open and a man rushes into the room. Neil immediately points the gun at him, and the man stills.

“Hey, it’s just me,” the man says. He’s good-looking — dark, slicked-back hair, perfectly tailored suit, and unreadable brown eyes. The niggling feeling of familiarity that Neil felt when he saw the silver briefcase sharpens into a warning in Neil’s head at the sight of this man. He’s pretty sure he’s never seen the man before, but his instincts are screaming otherwise.

The man frowns when Neil doesn’t put the gun down. His eyes flick towards the couch, and his lips press together.

“Neil. What happened? Where’s Sator?” the man practically demands, as if he doesn’t have a gun aimed at his head.

“Look, my friend, I’ll tell you where Sator is if you tell me how to leave this place. Which, I’ll remind you, would be an extremely good idea, given that I’m _pointing a gun at you_ ,” Neil says, hoping he’s made the right bargain. A dead man’s location for some information on whatever the _fuck_ is happening to him right now, or at least a chance to get out of it.

And Neil feels the exact moment when all of the man’s attention narrows down to focus on him. It's heavy, making his skin tingle, and the man’s gaze pierces through him.

“You don’t remember me,” the man says. It should sound like a question, but it doesn’t.

Neil stays silent.

“You don’t remember,” the man says again, his brows drawing together tightly. Neil hears him curse under his breath, then the man’s intensity finally lets up a bit as his eyes sweep over the unconscious trio around the room. “Then do you remember the three of them?”

Neil shifts his grip on the gun. “Answer my question first.”

The man stares at him some more, and then he visibly gives up on talking to Neil and moves towards Kat.

Neil fires at the ground in front of him, the shot loud in the room, and the bullet is swallowed by the carpet. The man doesn’t even look fazed, but he does stop once more.

“Don’t touch them,” Neil snarls. In the back of his mind, he’s vaguely surprised at his own out-of-control vehemence.

“ _Neil_ ,” the man just says. The quiet note of desperation in his voice seems oddly out of place.

  
“It’s me. _Arthur_.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heLLO frens life is now hectic once again so please don’t expect regular updates! (or tbh any updates at all in the next few months)

Arthur, huh. He might be pretending to know Neil, and acting like Neil should recognise him to disorient him and take advantage, but Neil’s intuition is telling him that the man’s bewilderment isn’t faked.

If Arthur knows him but Neil doesn’t know him in return, perhaps a while later Neil inverts himself, and they meet some time in Arthur’s past? Arthur’s confusion about Neil’s lack of recognition indicates that he probably isn’t aware of the possibility of inverting oneself into the past, which means Neil didn’t meet him to recruit him for Tenet. Or, this Arthur person is not as clever as he looks, and he knows of time inversion, but hasn’t connected the dots with Neil’s utter cluelessness regarding who he is.

“Alright,” Arthur mutters, dipping his head. “Neil, let’s sort this out,” he says, hands raised placatingly.

Neil’s muzzle stays pointed at Arthur. His arms are starting to ache a bit, but Neil’s been through much worse. Ha. After all, he’s been shot in the head.

“Are the three of them okay? Have you checked on them?” Arthur nods towards the unconscious people lying around the room.

“You know them as well?” Neil raises his eyebrows. Arthur’s eyes had drifted towards Kat for a moment there.

Arthur presses his lips together into a tight line. “If you know them too, then I hope you agree with me that it’s important to check on their condition, because something obviously went wrong between you guys going under and you waking up.”

“I’ve checked him,” Neil gestures towards the Protagonist. “You can check the other two. _Slowly_ ,” Neil says, as Arthur moves towards the couch.

Arthur gives Kat and Ives a perfunctory check while Neil tries to puzzle out what Arthur means. ‘Going under’? It seems like he’s implying that they hooked themselves up to the silver contraption and became unconscious… on purpose? But why? What does the briefcase do?

Where is he right now and how exactly is he alive?

“Alright,” Arthur says, turning towards the briefcase, “I’m going to check the PASIV as well, don’t shoot me.”

“Don’t touch it,” Neil says, finger hovering over the trigger. A ‘passive’? Neil feels like there’s an increasing chance that Arthur is messing with him.

“I won’t. I’ll just look.”

Arthur seems to be able to interpret the various readings on the device, and after a quick skim he nods and says, “They’re all at what should be normal levels. We won’t wake them yet.”

“Why not?” Neil challenges. “Will they tell me something you don’t want me to know?”

Arthur just gives him a _look_. “No, in fact, I’d probably be able to figure out what went wrong if there are more people here. But time’s far from up and we don’t know if they’ve finished the job. We need to give them the chance to, or this will all be for nothing.”

‘Time’s far from up’? They’re on a job? What kind? Tenet has never used a silver briefcase like that before, as far as Neil’s aware. Is it something from the future? Has the Protagonist been keeping more secrets from him than he realised?

“Okay, the second thing is, do you actually know who Sator is, or were you only pretending to know him just now?” Arthur asks.

“I know Sator,” Neil says simply. If Arthur is piecing together a story to tell Neil based on information that Neil gives him, he won’t have an easy time of it.

Arthur studies him quietly for a while. “Okay. Do you know where he went? He should have been hooked up as well,” he says, gesturing towards the IV line on the sofa seat next to Kat.

That bastard was here?

How much of what Arthur says can he trust?

Neil’s starting to get a headache from his own cluelessness. Or maybe it’s the bullet wound — phantom bullet wound?

Can the Protagonist please wake the fuck up and give him some answers?

* * *

Something has obviously gone wrong in the fourth level or even this level, but Arthur can’t imagine what in the fucking world could have left Neil _this_ disoriented. Neil’s eyes are tracking his every movement, and Arthur notices the minute way the tendons in his hand flex whenever Arthur shifts towards the Protagonist.

So he recognises the Protagonist, and is still overly concerned about him. And he probably did already check over the Protagonist’s vitals, and wasn’t just trying to keep Arthur away from the man. Probably.

“Neil, do you know who the three of them are?” Arthur tries again, nodding towards the three of the team still lying around the room.

“Arthur, is it?” Neil pins him with his signature interrogation look, staring straight into Arthur’s soul, “Arthur, my friend, I have no idea to what extent you’re trying to mess with my mind, so I’m not going to tell you who I think they are, alright?”

What’s got Neil so shaken that he’s laying his thoughts bare like that? His gaze is clouded, like a dreamer waking in Yusuf’s dream den, unsure of his place in this world. Hazy.

Perhaps Arthur should wake the others. This fugue that Neil’s in doesn’t seem to be something that he can shake himself from. If Arthur wakes one of the others, the other two can still finish the job, and the person awake can clarify the situation for himself and Neil.

Unless that person is also in the same state as Neil.

If that’s the case, perhaps something went wrong with the somnacin formula? After all, test runs cannot accurately reflect what would actually happen in the field, regardless of how much precautions Arthur takes—

Damn. He’s rushing ahead without enough information again. Arthur closes his eyes for a brief moment, resisting the urge to rub at his temple.

They all knew the risks when they took this job, Neil included. Arthur’s already done his best to minimise the risks. Now all he can do is decide what’s the best way to salvage this job, while making sure the team is all intact, both physically and mentally.

Please, let no one fall into limbo. Or have fallen, Arthur hypothesises, in Neil’s case. Not that the fourth level is that different from Limbo, to be honest. Yusuf spent a long time on the compound, but the dreamers still only have minimal control over the level at that point. Four dream levels is too many, but it is necessary to pull off this job.

Dom turned the job down the moment he heard the client’s request, saying he can’t risk losing himself again, that he needs to be there for the kids.

Arthur, however.

Eames had looked at him, that spark in his eyes bright as the glint of sunlight on whatever ridiculous gun Eames pulls out of thin air on jobs, bright as the bubbling energy that buzzes around Eames whenever he convinces Arthur to attend another art exhibition with him. Bright as Eames’ sheer delight plastered all over his face, no matter the situation. And, well.

Arthur is a weak, weak man.

So Arthur took the job with Eames, convinced Yusuf and Ariadne to join them, and they merged with an up-and-coming team that had a good track record and were willing to take the risks of this job. Neil, Ives, and the Protagonist. And Arthur knows many people in their industry use pseudonyms, or at least names that aren’t traceable to their families and such, including himself and Eames, but the Protagonist really took it to another level. Arthur almost admires him for it. Not even his own team knows his name.

But right now half their team are sleeping around the room and Arthur has no idea what went wrong in the fourth level, and Sator is gone, and Arthur needs to decide who’s the best choice to wake up right now.

Just as Arthur finally reaches up to rub at his headache, Ives blinks awake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> pls feel free to point out typos, my brain is not entirely online at the moment haha


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i sincerely regret my decision to write while uploading because this means my lovely and very unfortunate readers are getting irregular chapter updates of irregular quality (yikes) anyway yes i have no idea where the plot is going so… please don’t expect anything lmao (*throws this chapter at you guys and flees*)

The Protagonist gets another call from Kat. He deals with it, adrenaline coursing through his blood.

He gets another call, and handles it just as efficiently.

Then another one.

And another one.

And another.

By the time he gets to the scene of this call, his limbs no longer tense up and his heart no longer jumps into his dry throat. His body seems to have run out of energy for that.

How many years has he lived? (Too many.) How long has it been since Neil was killed? (An infinity.)

His limbs are heavy and his heart beats silently.

_But it’s alright_ , he thinks, instead of focusing on his surroundings, and that is how Ives gets the jump on him.

And then his heart is thundering in his ears again. He doesn’t know whether he wants Neil to be here to complete the picture, to have the opportunity to fix what happened the last time the three of them were in the same place, or for Neil to stay dead so he doesn’t have to die again, since Ives did promise to kill them if he sees them again.

He still hasn’t gone back to recruit Neil yet.

“You’re still here,” Ives says, staring straight at him. Kat begins to appear around the corner somewhere behind Ives.

“I am,” the Protagonist replies, calm, calm, _calm_. Ives might be the only person alive who has a chance of winning against him in a fight.

“Are you done hiding the pieces of the algorithm you had?”

“I am.”

“Then we both need to be dead,” Ives says, and starts to raise his gun.

With a few quick steps, the Protagonist is in Ives’ blind spot. “And what are you going to do with Kat?”

“She needs to be dead too,” Ives says, twisting around. The Protagonist grabs his wrist as he moves and uses his own momentum to knock the gun out of his hand. The gun skids across gravel loudly, and in the distance, Kat stills.

“No, she doesn’t,” the Protagonist bites out. “She doesn’t know where the pieces are. She’s not even involved with Tenet.” She’s digging for her phone in her bag right now, about to make the call that he will have received in his past. “Just let her live in peace, Ives. She’s not us.”

“She _is_ ,” Ives replies, voice low but firm. “She knows too much. She should have died the moment Sator did. Job’s done, mission complete, now we all need to off ourselves so that no one ever digs up the algorithm again.”

A familiar irritation and exhaustion scratches sharply at his chest. “No, Ives, don’t you see? Tenet is an ongoing project and it needs to be, because firstly, this is a long-term temporal pincer which needs direction, and secondly, no matter how well we hid the pieces, somewhere down the line someone’s going to find them, and Tenet needs to be there to run interference.”

“Sator’s gone, no one’s looking for them.”

“You don’t know that. Plenty of people are out for the algorithm.”

“Sator’s the only one who matters, and he’s dead.”

“Ives, _listen to yourself_. You’re not making any damned sense.”

Kat is done with the call, and begins to walk away quickly. Ives’ eyes slant towards her disappearing figure, and the moment his body tenses in preparation for movement, the Protagonist has already tackled him to the ground.

Ives grunts as the Protagonist locks his arms in place. “Nothing makes sense anyway,” Ives growls. “How on earth is an algorithm for fucking around with time stored in a physical object that can be conveniently disassembled into extremely convenient pieces? How have we not aged a day, even though our memories are intact and hence our brain and body are still experiencing time linearly from our perspective, regardless of our repeated use of turnstiles? Nothing makes sense and it’s not supposed to!” he grits out against the gravel pressing into his face. “But I know what I know. I feel it, deep in my gut. This is wrong. We don’t belong here. We need to be dead.”

“You’re _out of your goddamned mind_ , Ives. Go to hell, for all I care. I need to be alive to keep things running so that everything we’ve done isn’t for nothing,” the Protagonist says. His voice is shaking, ever so slightly. Ives’ questions are ones that he’s avoided thinking about for, well, a long while.

He’s been ignoring some of his own gut feelings for a long, long time. They always give him a pounding headache that presses against his eyes too hard.

Ives bucks in a violent burst under his hands, and nearly succeeds in throwing him off. “The plan was always to get the algorithm, take it apart and hide the pieces, and then kill ourselves!”

“I was, and still am, and will be the one making all the plans, Ives. _I’m the one behind Tenet_. Is that getting through your thick skull?” the Protagonist says, hoarse. “At the very least, I need to be alive so that I can go back in time and recruit Neil. Maybe the plan you keep mentioning was the plan you were given and expected to carry out, but given the fact that I am the one making the plans and running things, _I need to be alive_.”

A long, uneasy pause fills the air. The Protagonist watches as Ives winces and squeezes his eyes shut, as if bracing against some kind of pain. There’s something clenched tightly in his fist.

“I don’t remember… I don’t think… You’re not the only one who headed Tenet. We did it together,” Ives says quietly. “You, me, Neil, and Kat.”

“If what you say is true, then that’s even more reason that Kat and I need to be alive, so that we can go back and meet you and Neil to plan this fucking thing, since obviously Kat wasn’t recruited beforehand when we met her. But you don’t sound very fucking sure, Ives.” The Protagonist finally maneuvers himself into a position where he can hold Ives down while kneeling on his wrist, until he has to unclench his fist.

A key attached to a miniature Rubik’s Cube keychain falls out of Ives’ hand, slightly bloodied by where it has cut open his palm because of how hard he was holding it.

The Protagonist frees a hand to reach for it, only for Ives’ eyes to widen and snarl, “ _Don’t touch it_ -”

And then the world flips on its side and he is under Ives, the gun is back in Ives’ hand and pointed at him, and Ives is still wincing but his eyes are wild and bloodshot, and suddenly the Protagonist’s own gun is in his hand-

And he pulls the trigger on Ives.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ives is slightly more clear-headed than the others, but he’s still very affected by being in the fourth level.
> 
> I am also realising that nearly everyone in this fic has a headache but I also constantly have headaches so you’re all just gonna have to deal with that lmao.
> 
> Once again, feel free to point out typos/mistakes, and speculation/suggestions are very much welcome! (aka. p l e a s e s e n d h e l p)

**Author's Note:**

> I’m going to be honest with you guys and say that I have only the vaguest idea of where this fic is going, so I welcome any headcanons, predictions, and tag suggestions in the comments!
> 
> Thank you for reading <3


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